'Week of perfectly avoidable gaffes': how Pepsi, United and Spicer went wrong

Pepsi hasn’t had it this bad since it burned Michael Jackson. But when the company hurriedly pulled a poor-taste advert it turned out to be only the start of a nightmare few days for public relations that ended at the White House.In the fallout, marketing and ...

....Bombardier has rejected the allegations. Should Boeing win, Montreal-based Bombardier faces a potentially large fine which could put at risk a major order from US airline Delta and the wider C-series programme. ...

....99, travel insurance companies are warning all air passengers to check the small print of their insurance policies. The huge sale follows Ryanair’s recent PR catastrophe, in which the low-cost airline was forced to cancel 2,100 flights, affecting the travel plans of 315,000 customers. ...

....On occasion he has managed to insult diametrically opposed interest groups within a sentence. “The airline business is mostly run by a bunch of spineless nincompoops who actually don’t want to stand up to the environmentalists and call them the lying wankers that they are,” he has said. ...

....But a draft letter circulated among pilots based at airports across Europe criticised O’Leary’s overall handling of the affair, which has seen him threaten to force them to defer time off. In a separate letter sent earlier this week, pilots from more than 30 of Ryanair’s European bases had given the Irish airline until 10am on Friday to address concerns about their employment terms. ...

.... “I don’t even know how there would be industrial action in Ryanair,” he said at the meeting. Yet that analysis skirts around the fact that some of the pilots would like to unionise, as they do at most other European airlines. ...

....Ryanair’s cancellation of thousands of flights across Europe due to a backlog of staff leave has raised alarm bells in Italy over its attempt to buy the troubled flag carrier Alitalia. The Irish airline, which has experienced huge growth in Italy and controls 24. ...

....Ryanair has offered pilots a one-off bonus of up to £12,000 to forfeit holidays, according to a memo seen by the Guardian, as it battles to prevent further flight cancellations caused by a “mess-up” in its rota system. The Irish airline’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, apologised this week after saying that up to 50 flights a day would be cancelled until 31 October, affecting about 400,000 passengers. ...

....In a hastily arranged press conference in Dublin on Monday afternoon amid a passenger revolt and a slump in the company’s share price, the normally combative chief executive Michael O’Leary apologised “unreservedly” for “a mess of our own making”. O’Leary blamed a one-off holiday pilot rostering issue, which if not tackled immediately would send the airline’s on-time punctuality below 50%, adding that it will cost Ryanair about €25m (£22m) in compensation payouts and other costs. ...

....The first problem is Ryanair’s feeble explanation for the cancellations. The airline threw everything into the mix, from strikes by French air traffic controllers to thunderstorms, ignoring the fact that many are almost annual events. ...

....Ryanair has promised to publish details on Tuesday of all the flights it plans to cancel over the next six weeks following a passenger revolt, a slump in its share price and an expected compensation bill of £30m. The airline said on Twitter that “Between today and tomorrow all flight cancellations up and until OCT31 will be communicated. ...

.... But if, say, you are heading to Barcelona for a long weekend on Friday, and it says it won’t get you on a flight until Sunday, then it is likely to be breaching the EU rules. Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair chief executive, said on Monday the company would not book passengers on to rival airlines to get them to their destination on time. ...